Suzanne M. Hall
Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance Article (Accepted version) (Refereed)
Original citation: Hall, Suzanne M. (2015) Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance. Sociology, 49 (5). pp. 853-869. ISSN 0038-0385 DOI: 10.1177/0038038515586680 © 2015 The Author This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/61891/ Available in LSE Research Online: October 2015 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it.
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
1
Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance
Suzanne M. Hall Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology & Senior Research Associate, LSE Cities LSE Cities London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE [email protected] Submitted to Sociology on 15 August 2014. Final and accepted submission, 21 April 2015.
Abstract
This paper expands on the quotidian perspectives of ‘ordinary cities’ and ‘everyday resistance’ and explores the migrant urbanisms that emerge out of movement, mixing and exchange. The paper argues for a shift beyond a focus on encounter across racial and ethnic difference, to engage with whether everyday social practice can effectively contaminate political practice. The question is raised within the understanding that everyday life is rooted in inequality, and extends to an analysis of migrant participation in city life as creative expression and everyday resistance. Against a pernicious migrancy problematic in the UK that defines migration as an external force assaulted on national integrity from the outside, I explore migrant urbanisms as participatory practices of reconfiguration within ordinary cities, where diversity and innovation intersect. At the core of this exploration is how migrants are active in the making of urban space and urban politics.
Key words: migrant urbanisms, ordinary cities, everyday resistance, migration,
urbanisation, participation, reconfiguration, practice
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
2
Introduction: against the ‘migrancy problematic’
Thinking about ordinary spaces and everyday life opens up ways of understanding
complex global processes of urbanisation and migration. In responding to the Special
Issue on ‘Sociologies of Everyday Life’ I focus on the lived experiences of urban
migration in a context of accelerated mobility and increasing inequality. Engaging the
quotidian perspectives of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ with respect to urban migration
allows me to develop two related objectives. The first is a focus on the animate ways in
which cities are altered by migration, and the everyday movement, mixing and
exchange that saturates and transforms urban spaces. The second is a shift from the
sociology of encounter as a mundane or casual meeting between strangers, towards a
sociology of reconfiguration, one in which the social is integral to the political. An
underlying question for this paper is whether migration - and indeed urban multiculture
- can be understood as part of social and political processes of reconfiguration
emerging within and across connected societies, rather than as an assault on national
integrity. This seemingly simple question is set against a pernicious political mantra
across the UK and Western Europe that problematises migration as an external
imposition “being done to us from the outside”.
A key example of how immigration is currently positioned as an external force requiring
highly discriminatory regulation is evident in the recent Immigration Act passed by UK
parliamentary decree in 2014 (Home Office, 2014a). The Act authorises a legal regime
to control and manage immigrants across public and private spheres, not simply as
outsiders, but under the rubric of illegality. References to ‘sham marriages’ and ‘sham
civil partnerships’ are inscribed in Chapter 2 of the Act, while the public invocation of
‘Bogus Students’ has been used to monitor tertiary education enrolments, and to
revoke the ‘Highly Trusted Sponsor’ licence to recruit foreign students
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19425955). Following from the Act, the Right To Rent
Immigration Checks: Landlords’ code of practice (Home Office, 2014b) obliges private
landlords and letting agencies to check the visa status of prospective tenants.
Malicious public “experiments” pre and post the Act continue to focus on immigration
status, including the ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest’ slogan on vans driven
around the London Boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, Redbridge, Barnet, Brent,
Ealing and Houndslow, instituted by the Home Office in July 2013. The campaign met
with widespread resistance, generating both anger and fear (Jones et al., 2014), and
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
3
the Home Office ultimately conceded that the experiment would not be rolled out
across the UK. However, an increasingly elaborate regime of state and privatised
infrastructures that monitor and manage the migrant as a counterfeit citizen permeates
everyday life.
Against a political foreground in which the ‘migrancy problematic’ continues to escalate
(Gilroy, 2004: 165; Hall, 2015a), is an exploration of migration as a participatory rather
than an invasive process of change. Not only is large-scale migration entirely integral to
the economic and cultural momentum of our global era, but migrants also actively
participate in and shape core aspects of life in the UK. Emerging bodies of sociological,
economic and policy research trace these long-standing participations, with recent
contributions indicating the role of migrants in the British Military (Ware, 2012), the
growing presence of international students and lecturers across UK Universities
(Universities UK, 2014), and positive net fiscal contributions by migrants to the
economy that significantly outweigh the claim on state benefits (Dustmann and Frattini,
2014). Castles’ standpoint - that mobility is best understood as not distinct ‘from
broader societal relationships and change processes’ - offers a crucial footing,
advocating that migration research and migration policy ought to be embedded in ‘a
more general understanding of contemporary society’ (2010: 1566). The quotidian
perspective of the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’ offers a view of migration as integral to
ongoing processes of societal change and diversification, rather than as the exception
to it. This perspective challenges the out-dated insistence of regressive and indeed
ineffective state attempts to ‘control’ migration as a feature of entry and exit into and
out of national borders (Cohen, 2015):
We should be clear. It is not wrong to express concern about the scale of people coming into the country. People have understandably become frustrated. It boils down to one word: control. People want Government to have control over the numbers of people coming here and the circumstances in which they come, both from around the world and from within the European Union. (David Cameron, November 2014).
In arguing that the quotidian perspective allows for an understanding of migration as
part of the lived processes of societal change, it is necessary to advance our approach
to everyday life, towards what lived participation means in social, economic and
political terms. While it is important to recognise the significance of the day-to-day life
of urban migration and urban multi-culture (Neal, Bennett, Cochrane and Mohan,
2012), it is equally necessary not to engage in the apparent banality of the ordinary and
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
4
everyday simply as encounter. The casual interactions amongst diverse individuals and
groups may well exhibit important dimensions of ‘convivial’ (Gilroy, 2004) and
‘commonplace’ diversity (Wessendorf, 2014). However, alongside these productive
registers of interaction, lurk the enduring structures that limit migrant participation
through the virulent systems of social sorting by class, race, ethnicity and gender (Back
and Sinha, 2012). Beyond encounter, are a variety of approaches that engage with
more concerted practices of mixing and claims to difference. Robinson (2014)
highlights the emotional work required to participate in everyday exchanges in multi-
ethnic inner city local libraries in London and Berlin; while Garbin argues for the right to
alterity, capturing the ‘spatial appropriation, regeneration and re-enchantment of the
spatial landscape’, through the establishment of African Pentecostal churches in
London and Atlanta (2013: 677). Crucially, Hickman, Mai and Crowley (2008)
challenge prevailing political expectations that migrant assimilation and social cohesion
occurs against a foreground of accepting “shared British values”. Rather, their detailed
analysis across the UK reveals that prevailing inequality exacerbates social tension.
‘Cohesion’ is revealed less as a process of cultural acquiescence and more as an
active process of negotiating diversity in the context of uneven everyday life.
In the two core sections that follow, I develop a fuller articulation of how our
understanding of migrant participation can be advanced through engaging with the
ideas of ‘ordinary cities’ and ‘everyday resistance’. At this point I highlight the key ways
in which this paper aims to expand on migration as an integral process of social
change, as opposed to either an invasive process that threatens national integrity, or
as the fleeting and congenial interactions amongst urban strangers. But to what
everyday ‘city’ and to what ‘migrant’ do I refer? The conceptual and physical space to
with which I engage is the commonplace local urban high street within ethnically
diverse and comparatively deprived urban localities (see for example Zukin, Kasinitz
and Chen, 2015). In these apparently messy or banal linear strips activated by
migrants, where mobile phones, money remittance counters and hair and nail salons
converge, there is no overt migrant spectacle. The space of the street is neither the
charged border space of Melilla or Calais (Andersson, 2015), nor the macabre maritime
routes of those seeking refuge from carnage and famine (Sigona, 2013). In contrast,
the migrants who shape city streets occupy and transform a space made once the
national border is traversed. On the city street there are additional interior
demarcations, perhaps less spectacular and less perilous, but none-the-less a space in
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
5
which ingenuity and agility are necessary modes of practice to engage with underlying
precarity and prejudice.
Using the city street as an empirical reference, I engage with urban migration through
the ordinary spaces and the lived practices of transformation. I begin with the urban
frame of ‘ordinary cities’ as developed by Robinson (2006) as an approach for
refusing the categories of economic hierarchy in a global order, and with it the
relegation of seemingly less prominent or less valuable cities and citizens. By contrast,
I turn to an analysis of mixing and hybridity opened up through urban spaces of
interconnection including Robinson’s recognition of ‘many urbanisms’ and the
variegated forms of creative city-making. While the ordinary city motif is spatially
framed through varied urban geographies and localities, the frame of ‘everyday
resistance’ focuses on the sociabilities of and for difference. Both conscious and
mundane processes of everyday resistance are encapsulated in Lefebvre (1947) and
de Certeau (1984), where inequality is understood as integral to the maintenance of
capitalist societies, and resistance is therefore an inevitable part of everyday life. I seek
to expand on the everyday practices of resistance through how cultures of congeniality
amongst diverse individuals and groups resonate with the politics of reconfiguration; an
active making of new urban spaces and forms of citizenship.
Ordinary Cities: thinking about migrant urbanisms
The era of economic globalisation has been paralleled with an unprecedented scale
and pace of urbanisation, bringing in to focus how migration processes are connected
to processes of urban transformation, and vice versa (Glick Schiller and Çaglar, 2011;
Foner, Rath, Duyvendak and van Reekum, 2014). When John Berger and Jaen Mohr
wrote their book, A Seventh Man (1975), their aim was to show the centrality of labour
migration to the construction of modern Europe and its urban centres: at the time one
out of seven manual workers in Germany and in Britain were immigrant workers. Four
decades on, the impetus of an increasingly asymmetrical global economy is that we
now live in a world in which 232 million people are international migrants, with Europe
as the largest migrant region of 72 million migrants (United Nations, 2013). The
connection between migration and the transformation of cities continues, as is broadly
indicated through the 2011 UK Census: the urban cores are primary destinations for
historic and contemporary migration, and while 12% of the UK’s current population was
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
6
born outside of the UK, cities such as London (41,6%), Manchester (26.7%),
Birmingham (22.9%), Bradford (15.3%) and Bristol (14.9%) are increasingly composed
of diverse migrant groups (Paccoud, 2013: 3). What kinds of cities are made through
the convergence of diverse cultural and economic practices brought by migrants, and
how does the city in turn shape the everyday life and space of urban migration?
The question of the generative capacity of urban locality and city space has been at the
forefront of conceptualising ‘the global city’ in the era of economic globalisation
(Sassen, 2001). The notion of an urban hierarchy of ‘world class’ cities has served to
privilege the economic as a primary measure of urban expansion, and to emphasise
the capacities of global élites, international corporations and professionalised creatives
in the renewal of cities (for a valuable critique see Scott, 2006). However, the analysis
of ‘global cities’ through inventories of economic hierarchy and professionalised
prowess has rendered many cities and a diversity of urbanisation processes invisible
and/or invaluable; quite literally ‘off the map’ (Robinson, 2002). For Robinson the
ordinary cities perspective offers ‘a post-colonial re-visioning of how cities are
understood and their futures imagined’ (2006: 2), restoring to the map the cities and
urban spaces rendered invisible and inconsequential by the global city analytic. The
post-colonial project of revealing the ‘absent object’ (Mbembe, 2001) or Robinson’s
absent cities and citizens, therefore depends on an awareness of the endurance of
colonial prejudices, racialisations and relegations of certain cities and citizens.
Robinson further challenges Western-centric accounts of what constitutes innovation
and modernisation, and encourages us to engage with plurality or ‘many urbanisms’
and many modes of inventiveness.
How does the ‘global city’ analytic affect our comprehension of migrant urbanisation,
and how might the ‘ordinary city’ offer a means to engage with the range of city spaces
being made by migration? The rendition of the global city as an hierarchical and
prestigious territory potentially masks our understanding of migration as a process of
city-making in a number of important ways. Firstly, it omits understandings of the
relational and uneven consequences of migration and urbanisation across the planet.
Although transnational exchange occurs across space, there are also unequal
consequences of mobility; as London continues to grow through migration, for
example, there is also a counterpoint elsewhere of urban shrinkage or demise. The
2011 census data reveals that 158,300 people born in Poland currently in live London
(Paccoud 2013:11). However, Burrell’s work on East-West European mobility (2010) of
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
7
post accession migrants to the UK and in particular migration from Poland, reveals a
far more complex, relational global landscape. Secondly, the global city analytic
renders invisible internal inequalities within the city, and the subservient and precarious
infrastructures required to sustain the demands of the ‘world-class’ city. Migration
scholars have identified both the low paid, zero-hour contract and shift work labour
force, frequently fulfilled by migrants, and the increasing limits for migrants to access
secure forms of housing tenure (Zhang, 2004). Thirdly, it flattens out understandings of
diversity and creativity, privileging an ordained professional creative class (Florida,
2005) and valorising a ‘frequent flyer’ cosmopolitanism (Calhoun, 2002).
It is this third dimension of masking that I focus on, seeking to recognise that the city is
actively being made both within and outside of the fields of elites and experts. We know
comparatively little of the role of micro-global networks sustained by migrants in on-
going urban transformations, such as the day-to-day arrangements of micro-economies
that emerge from local and global connections. Similarly, we know little about the
impacts of migrant ‘ethnic minority entrepreneurialism’ (Aldrich and Waldinger, 1990)
and migrant labour, not only as practices sustained within ethnic enclaves (Portes,
1981), but as more expansive transactions and interactions that reshape city space
and city life (Hall, 2015b). While Block and May (2014) for example, reveal the
essential role of social capital including trust, empathy and skill operationalised largely
between employees and undocumented migrants within ethnic enclave economies, a
challenge remains to explore the broader circuits that reach across enclaves. The
focus on migration and its wider webs of exchange that I argue for in this paper, is less
singularly on the explicit categories of ‘employment’, ‘sector’ or ‘ethnicity’. Rather, the
emphasis is on transnational and transcultural modes of making, and detailed
understandings of mixed compositions of economies and spaces that are at once
globally and locally constituted.
In this vein, Ong (2011:10) advances the notion of ‘worlding cities’ as the active and
aspiring practices of making or participation. ‘Worlding’ is an essentially creative and
transformative practice, and Ong’s emphasises a particular urban intensity:
‘Worlding in this sense is linked to the idea of emergence, to the claims that global
situations are always in formation […] worldings remap relationships of power at
different scales and localities; but they seem to form a critical mass in urban centres’
(Ong, 2011:12).
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
8
Engaging with ‘ordinary cities’ in terms of migrant urbanisms encourages a view of how
a variety of creative urbanisms emerge (Robinson, 2006), where being global
incorporates the participatory practices of remaking urban space in relation to many
frames of cultural and geographic reference (Ong, 2011). Everyday mixing is
expressed in ‘material, structural and spatial dimensions’, all of which are integral to the
practices of re-making the city (Wise and Velayutham, 2014: 408). Building from this
base, I now refer to the ordinary space of the street and draw on recent research on
migration and urban streets to propose a definition of the ‘ordinary street’ as one realm
in which migrant urbanisms emerge.
The first aspect of the ‘ordinary street’ is evoked by an overlapping urbanism of trade
and exchange, where a diversity of proprietors and customers intersect. Individual
allegiances and affinities locate, both through a coalescence of intercultural city-making
and/or a side-by side retention of cultural distinctions. The practices of procuring and
arranging a diverse range of goods, services, materials and spaces from near and far
places produces an urban collage, an amalgamated place in which it is not easy to
discern where one is in the world. ‘Ordinary streets’ are less about the explicit creation
of ethnic enclaves, or the segregation of ethnic minority entrepreneurialism within the
‘urban ghettos’ that Gold charts across the US (2010). While ‘ordinary streets’ may be
located in comparatively deprived and ethnically diverse parts of cities, their spaces
and economies tend to incrementally emerge through wider and more varied diasporic
networks, as suggested in Zukin and Kasinitz’s account of Fulton Street in New York
(2015), or Hentschel and Blokland’s analysis of Müllerstaβe in Wedding, Berlin (2015).
While cohabitation occurs within family and ethnic networks, so too is there sharing and
experimentation across gender, racial and ethnic groupings, described in the
observation of ‘mutualisms’ or productive co-location within sub-divided shops on Rye
Lane in London (Hall, 2015b).
The collage arrangements at street scale are similarly evident at the scales of shop,
signage and surface, establishing a loose infrastructure of how spaces are arranged in
physical and temporal dimensions. Closer in nature to a market or bazaar, but within
the given street structure, shop interiors and exteriors are constantly mixed and
rearranged, where a hair salon merges with house cleaning services in one shop in an
ethnically diverse Toronto neighbourhood, for example, while cell phones, internet
services and money transfers merge with in another (Rankin, Kamizaki and McLean,
2015). On-going shifts might respond, for example, to the need for a wider variety of
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
9
tenures, with space divided into dimensions as small as a table for mobile phone
services, or a chair rented out per week for doing hair, combining daily, weekly and
monthly forms of rental (Hall, 2015b). Loose infrastructure potentially accommodates a
wider diversity of retail and retailers, and allows for an agile and fast-footed urbanism
that is frequently undetected by, or out-of-pace with, more bureaucratic planning and
management processes. While this ‘below the radar’ city-making emerges out of
ingenuity and precarity and accommodates many sorts of newcomers, its conditions
are always negotiated, often leaving the most fragile in the weakest positions
(Meneses-Reyes, 2013).
Finally, exchange on the street is pragmatic before it is ideological: individuals don't go
onto the street to ‘do multiculture’, but in the process of making shop or making trade,
economic and social exchange occurs (Hall, 2012). Exchange is reliant on face-to-face
forms of contact and implied forms of agreement, and for the most part, everyday
congeniality prevails. Conviviality is severely tested however, when there are
unanticipated interruptions to everyday life, and where perceived social differences are
used to exacerbate tensions (Gold, 2010). It is at the point of crisis that frictions and
oppositions arise, raising the question of whether day-to-day and highly individualised
exchange is a sufficient mode of civility to absorb confrontation, or whether more
collective or organised platforms of civility are required. I now turn to the context of Rye
Lane in Peckham in South London, to explore how the multi-ethnic traders on the street
deal with crisis, and engage with the question raised at the start as to whether
everyday social practice can effectively contaminate political practice. In the section
that follows, I explore whether social exchange that is practical, tacit and visceral
before it is ideological, is able to extend beyond encounter, towards the possibilities of
social and political reconfiguration.
Everyday Resistance: from the social, the political? In a compelling survey of high streets across London, researchers found that two thirds
of all Londoners live within a five-minute walk of a high street (Gort Scott and UCL,
2008). Defined simply as a minimum stretch of 250 metres of retail, the survey
suggests that the distribution of high streets across the city provides a sense of
‘everyone’s London’; an everyday urban infrastructure common to London life. The
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
10
realm of the ordinary street has featured significantly in contemporary social research,
as an expressive space available to those increasingly excluded from the prestigious,
world-class city, and as a space of comity that transcends the island of the ghetto or
the enclave (Anderson, 2011). More explicitly, the analytic of the everyday has
extended to incorporate the notion of protest and resistance “through” and not simply
“on”, the street. Hattori, Kim and Machimwa refer to ‘the Amateurs’ Revolt’ as a street
protest against nuclear power in the aftermath of the Fukushima plant failure in 2011.
The cluster of shops in Koenji in Tokyo and its surrounding public space ‘offered a
ready-made “scene” for protest’ (2015: 156); a loose civil infrastructure for rapid,
organised, but unannounced resistance. Here, the street provides a common and
accessible platform to co-ordinate an expression of shared discontent.
In the English ‘riots’ of August 2011, it was generally on local high streets that people
gathered, in a familiar public place close to home. As part of the ‘Reading the Riots’
project, Rodgers and Prasad (2011) traced that, on average, accused rioters were up
to 2.2 miles or a thirty-minute walk from home. On Rye Lane in Peckham, South
London, accused rioters were 1.5 miles from home, underscoring the significance of a
‘commons’ to which people can identify as part of their everyday life-worlds. While it is
not insignificant that Rye Lane was one of many high streets in which the August 2011
‘riots’ occurred, the form of protest I focus on in this section, is less about explosive
moments of dissent, and more connected to incremental processes of civil resistance.
To engage in the kinds of resistance that have begun to emerge on Rye Lane post the
2011 riots, it is necessary to begin with how the street is located in the economic and
cultural landscape of inner London. Peckham has, for many decades, been tainted with
an enduring designation of ‘deprivation’ and is the locus of on-going state-led
regeneration efforts (Glucksberg, 2013). The London Borough of Southwark in which
Peckham is located is comprised of a 60.3% ethnic minority population, while 42% of
the Peckham Ward is foreign born (Southwark Council, 2014, based on 2011 Census
Data, ONS). The Peckham Ward in which Rye Lane is located is categorised as
having a high Indices of Multiple Deprivation, and 38% of its residents are categorised
as living in the most deprived areas in Southwark (Southwark Council, 2014, based on
2010 Indices of Multiple Deprivation Census Data).
However, understandings of human capital and skill in Peckham remain largely un-
scrutinised, as do the presence of active economic networks that span within and
across the neighbourhood, extending to global webs of exchange. With this in mind, we
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
11
undertook an economic and spatial survey of Rye Lane in 2012, extending the study
over 2013 and 2014 to explore through interviews and observations, how traders
experienced change on the streets (Hall, 2015b). Our three-year fieldwork period
coincided with the emergence of a traders’ association. We began with a detailed
survey of the 199 independent shops along the kilometre stretch of Rye Lane and
focused on independent retail, which comprised of 65% of the shops. Amongst the
independent proprietors, we recorded over twenty different countries of origin including
Afghanistan, England, Eritrea, Ghana, India, Ireland, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Pakistan,
Kashmir, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam and
Yemen. In the survey we also asked independent proprietors how many languages
they spoke: 11% of street proprietors spoke one language; 61% spoke two to three
languages; and 28% spoke four languages or more. The language proficiencies of
proprietors on Rye Lane are remarkable, and in the proficiency category of four or
more languages, the street excels (Hall, 2013). The repertoires of multilingual
communication are as strategic as they are sociable, allowing proprietors to maintain
trade across wide-spanning networks, as well as to attend to the needs of an ethnically
diverse clientele. In parallel to the realities of inequality that permeate everyday life in
Peckham, are therefore a range of fluencies and competencies that allow individuals to
participate in a diverse cultural landscape, one which is forged across local and global
scales. But in the context of this diversity, what are the resources necessary to cope
with crisis; how does the everyday life on a multi-ethnic street adapt to cope with
internal and external stress?
During our study, we became aware of three particular crises that impacted on the
everyday life of the street, requiring a response on the part of traders, customers and
residents, beyond “business-as-usual”. To start with, the global financial crisis that
surfaced in 2008 has had significant reverberations across the UK high street retail
economy. Numerous studies into the demise and alternative future of the “British” high-
street followed, in response to the high vacancies in shops that came to exemplify
struggling and failed high street economies (Wrigley and Lambiri, 2014). Rye Lane
exhibited comparatively minimal levels of vacancy in 2012 (10%) however, traders
noticed the effect of customers simply having less to spend: ‘Sometimes [business] it’s
good. Sometimes it’s bad. The last months, business has been bad.’ (Interview with
Ziyad, 2012). Like many well-located inner-city areas in London, Peckham is
evidencing an increase in property values in both residential and retail sectors. Omar,
who has been in clothing retail on Rye Lane since 1984, and who owns his shop,
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
12
comments that it might be more profitable to rent out his shop rather than run his
business within it, ‘I may just rent my property, sit back and collect the money and
enjoy life.’ (Interview with Omar, 2012). For many traders, however, the impacts of the
recession require more agile responses to engaging with the parallel realities of
reduced spending power on the street, and increasing rental costs.
While the first crisis was economic in its origin and impact on the street, two additional
crises have had political implications for how actors on the street view their individual
and collective future. A planning and regeneration initiative co-ordinated by the London
Borough of Southwark is underway for the Peckham Town Centre, together with on-
going consultation on the Development Action Plan (Southwark Council, 2012). As is a
familiar motif in numerous urban regeneration processes, varied local groups vocalise
that their interests are under-represented in the regeneration process. Further, some
local groups identify a ‘disconnect’ between the mode of consultation or participation
and the translation into policy and plans. In the words of an activist and leader of an
established community engagement initiative that facilitates discussion about the future
of Peckham Town Centre:
I have dedicated myself, because it is for a higher, a deeper and a wider cause than simply investing in physical infrastructure in Peckham. It’s because I passionately believe that the human race actually needs a different way of organising itself at neighbourhood level, which works differently with the policy makers – we need a different way of doing it. We’ve got a huge, dreadful disconnect with people in their ordinary lives, and the people who take policy decisions in the professional, technical and managerial world. (Interview with Ethel, Peckham activist, 2014).
Traders too have felt under-represented in both day-to-day and concerted regeneration
initiatives. Abdul, a trader on Rye Lane, comments that a lack of collective organisation
on the part of the traders had previously limited the possibility of responsive
engagement with officers working in the Borough:
Back in 2009 I feel for it because we had a problem with the Council doing their job in Rye Lane. We had no voice, no one could hear us, if we have any problem, serious or small, no one would take any notice if we don’t take care ourselves. (Interview, 2014).
In the course of our discussion with planners in the Borough over our research period,
it was apparent that no formal survey of the actual retail composition and performance
of Rye Lane had been undertaken to inform the regeneration process (although a
consumer-oriented survey had been commissioned). The value of the established and
emergent micro-economies on Rye Lane seemed to remain invisible to those officially
responsible for co-ordinating the town centre regeneration. In dealing with day-to-day
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
13
issues, such as the official regulation of items sold within the shops, traders also
suggested that the relationship with the Borough was at times uncoordinated:
They think we don’t know our rights, and most of us, we don’t now our rights…but why don’t they work with us? That is why I am learning my rights, and we are learning our rights together. (Interview with Abdul, 2013).
Finally, an incident in September 2012, involving an alleged sale of a malfunctioning
mobile phone to a young man in a shop on Rye Lane, rapidly brought tensions to the
fore, and propelled the formation of the traders’ association forward. The phone had
allegedly been bought without receipt and the young man was apparently offered no
compensation when he confronted the proprietor. A heated street protest representing
the party who had brought the phone grew. What mediates in such a situation, where
expressions of racial and religious differences enter into the process of protest? A short
film released onto You Tube captures an important moment of mediation, where varied
parties met on the street in October 2012, to underscore a commitment to working
together (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbgZifpP68E):
- A representative of the protesters: The purposes of why we are here […] as civil people [...] is to show respect […]. We don’t play the divide and rule game. Let’s deal with this with decorum as respectful African people, Caribbean people, community people […]. One voice. […] Now Mr X will address the people. - Mr X, representative of the traders: The retailers of Rye Lane value the support of local people. We recognise that working together we try and improve Rye Lane […]. The incident involving Mrs W and her son should never have been allowed to happen the way it did, and we regret it, we offer our apologies. Most importantly we would like to work with her and her group to ensure such an incident never happens again. We work together to improve the relationships. - A member of the protesters: What do you propose to do to make this better? What steps are you going to put forward? - Mr X: (Mr X mentions three things: better camera coverage on the street, starting a more inclusive employment programme on the street between the proprietors and people who live in the area, and the establishment of a traders’ association) We are working together, we will have regular meetings to work together. - A member of the protestors: Do you have a customer services policy that will allow us to make proper complaints when things happen? - Mr X: Yes, we have an association now. - Mrs W, parent of the child who brought the mobile phone: I am pleased we have had the opportunity to meet Mr X and Mr Y to find a resolution. Can I personally thank them for their commitment to this. We see this as an opportunity to move forward together that we can have a regular dialogue. We formally accept your apology and draw our protest to a close.
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
14
A further dimension of mediation in the incident above also involved the participation of
ancillary groups. A local vicar comments:
We have had small success in Peckham. It grew out of some tensions in Rye Lane, of racial and religious elements, that brought the secretary of the mosque into the same forum as I was as a vicar. We had a multi-faith walk, and we entered into each other’s religious spaces. We had about seventy participants, and we were showing a respect in practical ways beyond a false mystique. […] Beyond the crisis, initiatives are time-consuming and slow processes. I’ve twice attended main Friday prayers and been invited to speak about solidarity between Christians and Muslims, and was warmly received. […] There are very few places where people can engage in civil society, engage in careful listening. (Interview with a local vicar, 2014).
The traders’ association is potentially a place where people can engage in ‘careful
listening’ as well as proactive efforts to engage in change. The engagement itself is
made both possible and fragile by the rhythm of everyday life. Abdul comments that it
is not always easy to sustain the momentum of the association because of the
constraints of time:
It is not easy. Everyone on this street is struggling with their business. People have no time. After working long hours, they just want to go home and if you ask them to stay for a meeting, they are sometimes too tired. (Interview with Abdul, 2013).
However, Abdul also explained that small but important victories maintain collective
momentum, and reflected on a situation where the association, through its collective
identity, had managed to secure a market stall for a long-standing market member. The
Borough had initially revoked the market stall holder’s position over the busy trading
days leading up to Christmas. While the market stall holder had made little progress as
an individual in attempting to retain her trading rights, when the traders’ association
sent an email to the Borough, it was then that her rights were upheld. Abdul suggests,
‘One email was enough. This is that small example of being together.’
How then, are the everyday politics of diverse migrant groups constituted on Rye Lane,
and what are its political forms and modes? To begin with, a somewhat modest yet
significant political set of practices persists, a dimension that Amin reflects on as ‘a
politics of small gains and fragile truces’ in the pursuit of plurality and difference (2006:
1012). Similarly, Bayat in the context of the ‘interreligious’ and ‘intertwined cultures’ of
the Middle East, directly engages with ‘the quiet and unassuming struggles of the
ordinary’ (2013: 5). Here, the street is not only a common public platform, but is also a
space in which individuals and groups are highly invested. For some it is the space
close to home, for others a means of making a living. For all those invested, it is on and
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
15
through the street that dialogue is established and maintained. In addition, a loose
cohesion of interests, including traders, other activist groups as well as religious
groups, come together around collective events – be those celebratory occasions or
moments of crisis. These active forms of meeting across different interests occur
through organised protests, workshops, or co-ordinated cultural and religious events,
which tend to occur on or in proximity to the street, all of which require leadership and
protocol. Regularity is a further important dimension of organised resistance on the
street, and relies on high stakes as well as small gains to sustain interest. A significant
fragility is the lack of time; most individuals participate in collective forms of action as
an additional activity outside of their core practices. Aspects like email and the platform
of the internet reportedly contribute to organising interests and actions on a day-to-day
level, but it is in the face-to-face forums where individuals and groups ‘can engage in
careful listening’ that shared platforms of civility are reinforced.
Of significance in the everyday street politics on Rye Lane outlined in this paper, are
expressions of the recognition and right to difference. Protestors, activists and traders
on Rye Lane are not focused around a mantra of “British Values”, but around a basic –
if not always consensual - claim for living with difference. ‘Values’ are expressed in
numerous dimensions: as the need for agreed protocols (as basic as a customer
services policy); as the need for shared platforms (expressed through multilingual
communication, trade associations, and multi-faith forums); and as the need for
individual and group expression, frequently articulated in ethnic dimensions including
shop products and layouts. Everyday streets politics evolves through both crisis and
common ground, where crisis provides a momentum for collective action, and common
ground provides a medium for refining the forms of collective engagement. This street
politics is neither without friction nor vulnerability. However, it is expressive of the need
and right for contestation and concurrence, and therefore encourages an
understanding of togetherness, mixing and diversity outside of the ideologically canon
of cosmopolitan tolerance (on which, see Jazeel, 2011: 77).
Perhaps the street politics on Rye Lane suggests that the point of a diverse and
expressive public is not ‘how to confer civic status’ on minority or migrant groups (Meer
and Modood, 2011: 18) but how platforms of civility emerge and are sustained within
and across diverse groups in order to express and advance diverse needs through
forms of collective action. The street is about collective voicing, and about protest and
dissent. At times basic platforms of civility on the street deal with collective issues
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
16
ranging from the rights to trade, to securing recognition with planning and regeneration
initiatives advanced by local authorities. Forming associations across diverse groups
and against the backdrop of busy lives is frequently a fragile endeavour, and diversity,
and lack of resources (including time), mean these platforms are often slow to grow
and hard to maintain. In this sense, street voicing is neither a domestic, nor
domesticated activity, but a space of constitution for a locally emergent politics that
engages with wider claims of belonging.
A sociology of the ordinary and the everyday
This paper has taken as a starting point the idea of the ordinary and the everyday to
advance a sociological perspective of migration as a participatory practice of social
change. By focusing on global migration through the everyday practices of societal
reconfiguration, I by no means disregard the significance of wide-reaching economic
globalisation and accelerated urbanisation. Rather, the quotidian frame allows for the
dominance of an hierarchical global order to be reconsidered through ‘ordinary cities’
and ‘everyday resistance’. The aim is to embrace a more radical prospect for living with
difference, through the realities and possibilities of ‘many urbanisms’ (Robinson, 2006)
and a more plural and highly social politics. At the core of both the ordinary city and
everyday resistance, is a fundamental regard for making as a mode of participation,
and in this paper I have focused on the street as a shared urban space actively being
made by migrants as they stretch their capacities and grow their networks across near
and far places. From this quotidian perspective two key points are advanced:
1. A deviation from framing migration as a process solely carried out by migrants
and regulated by states, towards understanding lived practices of migrant
participation within a context of mobility and inequality; and
2. To explore migrant urbanisms as processes of reconfiguration; as social
interactions of and for difference that extend beyond encounter through active
practices of movement, mixing and exchange.
Participation, as explored in this paper, is not only a process of social but also political
reconfiguration, where identity and belonging is renewed and remade rather than
simply accommodated. While migrant participation is about everyday acts of re-
composition, it occurs within highly uneven, racialised and ethnicised urban contexts.
Migrant urbanisms are also therefore about everyday resistance, and extend to how
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
17
resolutions are forged and how disputes are maintained between diverse groups and
between those with more power and those with less. I have used the notation of the
street to engage with a public space of overlapping urbanism and loose infrastructure
in which vast variety of ideas and infrastructures from near and far worlds intersect.
Further, the street encapsulates the potential of exchange and interaction as productive
frictions beyond casual encounter, which rely on congeniality and disagreement. I
argue that we need to pay closer attention to emerging platforms of civility, and the
ways in which diverse cultural expressions are given a wider voice, and a wider
authority to engage with power. The quotidian imperative is to understand, with
empirical depth, how platforms of civility emerge in cities that are increasingly diverse
and unequal. The challenge is to engage with the lived articulations and makings of
commonage, presence and protest, and to comprehend how these platforms develop
resources as they emerge, struggle, grow or demise.
What might the makings of urban migration as ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’, lend to our
sociological imagination? Reframing questions of belonging in a diverse and disparate
world, towards the spaces and practices of cross-over and intersection, allows for a
more complex view of how groups are updated through exchange. In the context of the
street, a sociology of migrant urbanisms calls for a sociology of exchange beyond
encounter: the conscious capacity of diverse individuals and groups to engage and to
be engaged beyond a single or dominant cultural register. In this paper, it has been
useful to extend the frame of ‘ordinary cities’ as the significance of varied geographies
and urbanisms, with the everyday practices of and for difference. In the detailed
sociology of ordinary cities and everyday resistance lies an empirical basis for rejecting
the generalised claims of either a dystopic diversity or flattened, consensual
cosmopolitanism (Lyon and Back, 2012; Rhys Taylor, 2014). The making of ordinary
cities and everyday resistance is therefore not only a practice of social conviviality, but
a cultural and political process that is activated between people within and across
societies in order to connect or conduct or protest, and to foster transition, renewal and
reconfiguration.
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
18
Acknowledgments:
The ‘Ordinary Streets’ project was conducted at LSE Cities from 2012 to 2014. My
thanks extend to all the research participants. The research team over that period
included: Thomas Aquilina, Antoine Paccoud, Nicolas Palominos, Hamza Siddiq, Sadiq
Toffa and Adriana Valdez Young, as well as Sophie Yetton who worked on the
‘Ordinary Streets’ film. Ricky Burdett provided support over the project period.
Note:
In line with conventions of anonymity in ethnographic fieldwork, all participants have
been anonymised, and pseudonyms have been used as substitutes for actual names.
Author biography:
Suzanne Hall is an urban ethnographer in the Department of Sociology at the London
School of Economics and Political Science. Her research and teaching interests
include social and economic forms of inclusion and exclusion in the context of global
urbanisation, and she currently focuses on the micro-economies and spaces of urban
migration. Suzi is working on an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant (2015-2017) for
a comparative project on ‘Super-diverse Streets: Economies and spaces of urban
migration in UK Cities’ (ref: ES/L009560/1).
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
19
References: Aldrich HE, and Waldinger R (1990) Ethnicity and entrepreneurship. Annual Review of
Sociology 16: 111-135.
Amin A (2006) The good city. Urban Studies 43(5-6): 1009-1023.
Anderson E (2011) The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. New
York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Andersson R (2015) Border control is out of control. Discover Society Issue 17.
Back L, Sinha S (2012) New hierarchies of belonging. European Journal of Cultural
Studies 15(2), 139-154.
Bayat A (2013) Life as Politics: How Ordinary People change the Middle East.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Berger J and Mohr J (1975) A Seventh Man. London: Verso.
Bloch A and McKay S (2014) Employment, social networks and undocumented
migrants: The employer perspective. Sociology, 1-18 (ahead of print, accessed 20
July 2014).
Burrell K (2010) Staying, returning, working and living: key themes in current academic
research undertaken in the UK on migration movements from Eastern Europe.
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 16(3), 297-308.
Calhoun C (2002) The class consciousness of frequent travellers: towards a critique of
actually existing cosmopolitanism. South Atlantic Quarterly 101: 870-97.
Cameron D (2011) Prime Minister’s address to the Conservative Party, 14 April 2011,
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/14/david-cameron-immigration-speech-
full-text
Castles S (2010) Understanding global migration: A social transformation
perspective. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36(10): 1565-1586.
Cohen R (2015) More Farage, more immigration. Discover Society Issue 18.
de Certeau M (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dustmann C, and Frattini T (2014) The fiscal effects of immigration to the UK. The
Economics Journal 124(580): 593:643.
Florida RL (2005) Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge.
Foner N, Rath J, Duyvendak JW and van Reekum R (eds) (2014) New York and
Amsterdam: Immigration and the New Urban Landscape. New York: NYU Press.
Garbin D (2013) The visibility and invisibility of migrant faith in the city: diaspora religion
and the politics of emplacement of Afro-Christian churches. Journal of Ethnic and
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
20
Migration Studies 39(5): 677-696.
Gilroy P (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge.
Glick Schiller N and Çaglar A (eds) (2011) Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and
Migrants. New York: Cornell University Press.
Glucksberg L (2013) Wasting the Inner-city: Waste, Value and Anthropology on the
Estates. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London. [Thesis]: Goldsmiths
Research Online. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/8715/
Gold S (2010) The Store in the Hood: A Century of Ethnic Businesses and Conflict.
Lanham: MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Gort Scott and UCL (2010) High Street London, June, London: Greater London
Authority.
Hall SM (2012) City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary. London:
Routledge.
Hall SM (2013) Multilingual citizenship. Discover Society 1: 1-3,
http://www.discoversociety.org/2013/10/01/multilingual-citizenship/
Hall SM (2015a) Migration and election 2015. Discover Society 17: 1-3,
http://www.discoversociety.org/2015/02/01/focus-migration-and-election-2015/
Hall SM (2015b) Super-diverse Street: A ‘trans-ethnography’ across migrant localities.
Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(5): 22-37.
Hattori K, Sunmee Kim, S and Machimura T (2015) Tokyo’s “living” shopping streets:
the paradox of globalized authenticity. In Zukin, S, Kasinitz, P and Chen X (eds)
Global Cities, Local Streets. New York: Routledge. Ch7. (pre-print version).
Hentschel C and Blokland T (2015) Life and death of the great regeneration vision:
diversity, decay, and upgrading in Berlin’s ordinary shopping streets. In Zukin, S,
Kasinitz, P and Chen X (eds) Global Cities, Local Streets. New York: Routledge.
Ch5. (pre-print version).
Hickman M, Crowley H and Mai N (2008) Immigration and Social Cohesion in the UK.
The Rhythms and Realities of Everyday Life. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Home Office (2014a) Immigration Act 2014. London: Home Office
Home Office (2014b) Right to Rent Immigration Checks: Landlords Code of Practice.
London: Home Office.
Jazeel T (2011) Spatialising difference beyond cosmopolitanism: Rethinking planetary
futures. Theory, Culture & Society 28(5): 75-97.
Jones H, Bhattacharyya G, Davies W, Dhaliwal S, Forkert K, Gunaratnam Y, Emma
Jackson E and Saltus R (2014) Go Home: Mapping the Unfolding Controversy of
Home Office Immigration Campaigns. ESRC and University of Warwick.
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
21
Kasinitz P and Zukin S (2015) From “ghetto” to global: two neighborhood shopping
streets in New York City. In Zukin, S, Kasinitz, P and Chen X (eds) Global Cities,
Local Streets. New York: Routledge. Ch2. (pre-print version).
Lefebvre H (1947) [1991 edition] Critique of Everyday Life (Vol. 1). Translated by John
Moore. London: Verso.
London Borough of Southwark (2012) Revitalise: Peckham and Nunhead Area Action
Plan. February 2012.” http://www.southwark.gov.uk/futurepeckham.
Lyon D and Back L (2012) Fishmongers in a global economy: Craft and social relations
on a London market. Sociological Research Online 17(2): 23.
Mbembe A (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Meer N and Modood T (2012) How does interculturalism contrast with
multiculturalism? Journal of Intercultural Studies 33(2): 175-196.
Meneses-Reyes R (2013) Out of place, still in motion: shaping (im)mobility through
urban regulation. Social & Legal Studies 22: 335-356.
Neal S, Bennett K, Cochrane A and Mohan G (2013) Living multiculture: understanding
the new spatial and social relations of ethnicity and multiculture in England.
Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 31(2) 308 – 323.
Ong A (2011) Worlding cities, or the art of being global. In: Roy A, Ong A (eds)
Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 1-26.
Paccoud A (2013) Country of birth in the 2011 Census: Local authorities and London's
Extended Metropolitan Region’ LSE Cities Working Paper,
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/51152/
Portes A (1981) Modes of structural incorporation and present theories of labor
immigration. In: Kritz M, Kelly CB and Tomasi SM (eds) Global Trends in Migration:
Theory and Research on International Population Movements. New York: Centre for
Migration Studies. 279-297.
Rankin, K, Kamizaki K and Heather McLean H (2015) Toronto’s changing
neighborhoods: gentrification of shopping streets. In Zukin, S, Kasinitz, P and Chen
X (eds) Global Cities, Local Streets. New York: Routledge. Ch6. (pre-print version).
Rhys-Taylor A (2014) Intersemiotic fruit. In: Jones H and Jackson E (eds) Stories of
Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location. London: Earthscan, Routledge 44-
56.
Robinson J (2002) Global and world cities: A view from off the map. International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(3): 531-554.
‘Migrant urbanisms: ordinary cities and everyday resistance’, Final submission to Sociology, April 2015.
22
Robinson J (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London:
Routledge.
Robinson K (2014) An Everyday Public? Placing Public Libraries in London and Berlin.
Doctoral Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Rogers S and Prasad R (2011). England riots: mapping the distance from home to
offence. Reading the Riots. The Guardian, 5 December 2011,
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/datablog/2011/dec/05/england-riots-distance-
travelled-map.
Sassen S (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Scott AJ (2006) Creative cities: Conceptual issues and policy questions. Journal of
Urban Affairs 28(1): 1-17.
Sigona N (2013) Italy ignores real cause of lampedusa refugee tradgey. The
Conversation. https://theconversation.com/italy-ignores-real-cause-of-lampedusa-
refugee-tragedy-18928
Southwark Council (2014) Southwark Demographic Factsheet. May 2014.
United Nations (2013) International Migration Report. United Nations, Department of
Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.
Universities UK (2014) International students in higher education: the UK and its
competition’, series on The Funding Environment for Universities 2014, Report 4.
Ware V (2012) Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR Country. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Wessendorf S (2014) Commonplace Diversity: Social relations in a super-diverse
context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wise A and Velayutham S (2014) Conviviality in everyday multiculturalism: Some brief
comparisons between Singapore and Sydney. European Journal of Cultural Studies
17(4): 406-430.
Wrigley N and Lambiri D (2014) High street performance and evolution: a brief guide to
the evidence. Southampton: University of Southampton, 24pp.
Zhang L (2004). Forced from home: Property rights, civic activism, and the politics of
relocation in China. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World
Economic Development 33 (2-4): 247-281.
Zukin S, Kasinitz, P and Chen X (eds) Global Cities, Local Streets. New York:
Routledge.